


Red and Green

by Lorelaia



Series: Marvels [1]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Canon!Violence, Child Abuse, Gen, Memory Loss, Odin is a Douche, Twisted, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-18
Updated: 2012-11-18
Packaged: 2017-11-18 23:18:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,918
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/566386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorelaia/pseuds/Lorelaia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fear not death. For the sooner we die, the longer we shall be immortal (Benjamin Franklin)</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Blood, bone, and the making of a woman. There is no truce for the sons of Loki Liesmith in Odin’s eye.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Red and Green

**Author's Note:**

> She thinks that she was different, once.

In the end, they are betrayed.

 

They are young, yet, in the reckoning of the Æsir – little more than children, perhaps, in the sums of the many worlds. They are two – twins even, Váli and Narfi, young and dark-haired and green of eye; mischievous in the way of all children, honest as only the very young can be. They do not wonder, overmuch, about the world beyond themselves; they tire themselves instead through games and tricks, through love and chores, and sleep easily each night. They do not yet know to wonder at the shadows that darken their parents’ gaze, or to fear those who drove their family to shelter in the mountains.

 

They trust, still. That the world is a safe place, that their parents are invincible, that they will be safe.

 

Fantasies, the all of it.

 

*

 

The man comes with the red dawn, bright and cold, vivid and fierce. Their parents are in the mist of the mountains and they play alone in the shelter of the house. The man comes to them, cold as crisp winter, and his single eye is blue as the sky on a summer’s morning.

 

He stretches out his hands and they come to him, and follow. They do not think to be afraid.

 

*

 

They are taken to a cave.

 

There are others there, all full-grown and gruff, garbed strangely like the one-eyed man in leather and metal. The strangers take three stones slabs, heaving under their weight, and place them on their edges before making a hole in each. The children watch, held still by the man with one eye, and when it is done – when it is ready – the man places a hand on Váli’s shoulder.

 

He says one word and it is a wolf who sits where the child once stood; and the man bends his head and breathes into the wolf’s ear.

 

After, when the wolf’s muzzle is red as flame and dawn and his teeth crunch bone and marrow; the beast remembers enough to know the flesh he eats was once his brother.

 

*

 

When it is finished and Loki writhes between the rocks, when the strangers are gone and the wolf licks the blood from his muzzle; the one-eyed man looks to the wolf. He blinks and it is a boy who crouches naked and trembling in the dirt, and who licks the blood from his hands like a cat.

 

The man curses the boy. The curse is this:

 

  Live.

 

*

 

The boy leaves the cave, leaves the screams of his father and sobs of his mother, the remains of his brother rotting on the ground. The boy leaves the cave, slow-footed and small, and he forgets the cave and the wolf and the warm smell of baking bread in a house where he had once been loved, long ago.

 

He forgets blood and poison, forgets the strange man’s breath against his ear, forgets the colours of the mountains in spring. He forgets his own name.

 

The boy walks the secret paths between the worlds, shedding skins like leafs, until only green and red remain. The green he keeps for his eyes, though he no longer knows why; and red he colours his hair, watching it glitter like rubies in the sunlight. He wears the form of a girl, sometimes, and then a woman; and the red looks like blood against his pale cheeks.

 

It is pretty, he thinks.

 

*

 

She comes to Midgard, to a land of snow and ice. Here she finally lets herself rest, bathing her sore feet in the ice, and her hair spreads like blood against the snow. Far away a wolf howls, high and haunting, and deep within her in that hidden place her own little wolf cries out in empathy.

 

She falls asleep in the snow, watching the stars shimmer through velvet skies, and when her eyes finally close she dreams that the stars fall from the heavens to land tangled in her hair.

 

*

 

When she wakes there is a boy there, young and small as she had once been, his hair a dirty blond and his cheeks stained with soot. He is watching her quietly, eyes very wide, and as she sits up she sees her bright green eyes reflected in his gaze.

 

“Why are you asleep in the snow?” he asks, and his voice is high as a child’s, a lisp thickening his words. She thinks she remembers, long ago, another boy’s voice soft and high and light, but the memories are like the shadows of a dream and drift away from her grasping fingers. “Are you an angel?”

 

She doesn’t know this word, but the boy’s eyes brighten even in the face of her heavy silence. He points at her, young and innocent, not yet knowing to fear strangers found resting in the snow. She watches him and sees from the corner of her eyes her long red hair coiled like rubies upon the surface of the ice.

 

“I’ll call you Natalia!” he tells her with all the surety a child can manage. “Because it’s Christmas, and it means born at Christmas, and you’re an angel, and...”

 

_Natalia_. She ignores the rest of what the boy speaks, rolling the word between her teeth, letting her tongue know the sound of the word. She thinks she had another name, once, but the sounds of the letters chase the memories from her mind.

 

*

 

Somehow she acquires more names. Natalia, for the Christmas snow. Alianova and Romanov, for a dead princess long since lost to legend and to the cold winter breeze. She learns to love this cold land, this place that gave her a name, and the memories of the other worlds fade like glistening snowflakes before the coming warmth of spring.

 

*

 

Time passes, but she does not remember its measurement. She cuts her hair and it grows again, again and again, and it begins to tire her. She dislikes the reminder of the passing of the world and begins to cut her hair more regularly, until it sits always at her collarbones.

 

She leaves from one such meeting, paid for with the coins she had found in a man’s pocket, and steps out into snow-swept streets. There is a man, and he whistles for her, and she watches her red hair swing against her cheek and ignores it. He follows her through the billowing snow, through the cold that never really seems to lift, and when she passes a dark alley he snatches her arm and drags her inside.

 

He presses a knife to her throat and drops a kiss to her hair, and the strands brush red as blood across eyes green as jade.

 

She leaves his body in the alley. She takes his coat for warmth, his coins and notes, and hesitates over the knife. When she finally picks it up it is stained with her blood, just a little, and the red is beautiful on the blade.

 

She studies it, ignoring the body cooling by her feet, and slowly slides the blade into her boot.

 

*

 

She learns how to tease a man, how to torture one, how to kill. She acquires other weapons – a gun, more knives, a small device that jolts electricity straight into a person’s neck – yet she keeps the first knife in her boot, a reminder and a promise, and she grows into a woman tall and beautiful, a razor blade hidden in red silk.

 

The red of the people she kills is the same as the red of her hair. It is a pleasing match.

 

*

 

Her skills are noticed eventually, of course.

 

The man who is sent to kill her wields a bow rather than a blade, and his eyes are blue as summer skies and the snap of sunlight on the snow. He is beautiful, she thinks, even posed here to kill her, his gaze narrow across the drag of the string.

 

“Come with me,” he tells her, soft and low, and lowers his bow to offer instead his hand. She thinks she remembers another man, much older and much colder, who had offered his hand as well, but the red of his blood trickling from the cut on his brow distracts her and the memory fades like threads of smoke. “I’ll help you.”

 

His blood is as red as her hair, as rubies in the snow, as red as the dawn creeping slowly through a window. She blinks, watching him, and there’s still the knife in her boot. She has killed before and for less than this, and she could finish him before he moved; but his eyes are open and warm and his fingers wiggle, just a little, as if to invite her to take his palm.

 

She remembers another boy, much younger than him, green eyed and dark-haired to his blue eyes and blonde hair, but their expressions are the same.

 

She reaches out her hand.

 

*

 

She forgets the cave in the mountain, the stink of her brother’s rotting flesh, the drip of poison into a bowl and a father’s screams. She forgets a house perched on the mountain’s summit, the red glow of dawn through the shutters of the window, the dark shadow of a man in the door. She forgets the fall of worlds through the Yggdarsil tree, the spread of branches thin as reeds against the sky, and the heat of the path below her feet as she twists magic around herself.

 

She forgets to be alone.

 

She follows Clint, follows Coulson and SHIELD, and finally she follows the Avengers. She raises a gun against a man in India and breathes down her own fear against the snap of his hands on the table. She builds a family around herself, fragile and small, and falls in love with this little group of unique individuals so gently and slowly she barely even notices. She forgets everything that isn’t them, that isn’t this time and place, and forgets who she once was before a boy named her in the crisp fall of the Christmas snow.

 

She strokes her fingers through Tony’s hair when he falls asleep against her, his head in her lap, the others a warm radius of heat as they watch silly, foolish movies. She watches the movie with half-lidded eyes, listening to the boom of Thor’s amusement and the soft guffaws of Bruce, the loud burst of laughter from Clint and the quiet chuckles from Steve. Tony grumbles in his sleep, displeased with the noise, and her eyes turn to look down at him. His hand is open against his chest, fingers long and fine, and there is a scar cast in white on his palm.

 

She traces it with a delicate finger and thinks it looks almost like a letter, but she no longer remembers what it means.

 

*

 

She thinks, when she meets Loki’s eyes, that she was once not as she was. She thinks she once was more, or less, or something entirely different. She thinks, once, that there were three stone slabs and another man who wore leather and metal. She thinks that there was a house.

 

She thinks there were once two boys who did not yet know to fear, who curled within their blankets and told tales as the red dawn crept warm and soft against the shutters of the windows.

 

She thinks they learn, later. For now she studies herself in the mirror, green and red, jade and blood; and she thinks the colours pleasing in the light.


End file.
